well, good day. (especially to Ericpuryear)
i am a newbie here. just installed TOR and TOR extension to my firefox.

my primary intention is to avoid being monitored by the newtwork admistrator in my office netwrok. can TOR do that? and at what expenses.

Really need advice from u guys.

bye

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your IP has nothing to do with what your admin can find out. For one, he is sitting BETWEEN you and the proxy, so he can see everything your doing. Not only that but by simply sniffing the traffic he'll know exactly where you are going, what you are viewing, what you are typing into online forms.. you name it.

Also.. thats usually a great way to get fired, and possibly even have a forensic investigation started just to make sure you didn't pass on company secrets, credit card info or anything else. I just finished an investigation on an employee who was bypassing network restrictions to use hotmail. They wanted to know what files he accessed, when, what he sent, etc
You might be able to use it to bypass restrictions to certain sites, but thats not going to stop him from seeing exactly what you are doing.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your IP has nothing to do with what your admin can find out. For one, he is sitting BETWEEN you and the proxy, so he can see everything your doing. Not only that but by simply sniffing the traffic he'll know exactly where you are going, what you are viewing, what you are typing into online forms.. you name it.

While it is true that the administrator can have complete control over the machine (and for example install keylogging software, or remote VNC and see the user's desktop), just sniffing at the network won't get him very far against Tor. Tor uses SSL to encrypt all data, and doesn't even leak DNS requests, as long as it's configured properly and using an appropriate proxy (such as Privoxy, which comes in the bundle).